OpenViz helps ConEd achieve a balance of power

With the energy crises and rolling blackouts that have recently plagued California and threatened Washington and Oregon, the thought is enough to make most folks appreciate their jobs even on a bad day.

But that is exactly how Consolidated Edison in New York used to monitor its power distribution across Manhattan Borough and Westchester County. In fact, ConEd operators had to monitor rows and columns of data from five applications residing in scattered locations, including legacy systems and homegrown applications the company had built over the years.

The need to integrate that data and implement a user-friendly interface led Con Ed to Advanced Visual Systems (AVS) and its OpenViz data visualization technology.

ConEd chose AVS, based in Waltham, Mass., in part because it was far easier to integrate its legacy systems and the data housed in homegrown applications with OpenViz than it would have been to migrate the data to new systems.

"This new functionality was implemented without tossing out any of our older systems," says Ted Maffetone, ConEd's department manager of distribution engineering. "We're just displaying it in a more modern way."

In addition to connecting disparate data sources, ConEd needed a highly scalable system. The company monitors 2,500 power distribution devices in Manhattan, which Artie Kressner, ConEd's director of research and development, estimates to be the equivalent of 25,000 nodes on a computer network. The OpenViz infrastructure is capable of supporting the number of network devices they currently have, as well as scaling to support more devices, which ConEd plans to add at a rapid pace, Kressner says.

Naturally, the company needed to retain its existing infrastructure, applications, and data while moving to the new presentation format.

"This is a continuous data stream, 24-by-seven-by-365, hopefully forever," Kressner says.

The process of implementing the cutting-edge technology proved relatively painless. Over a period of about six months, ConEd worked with AVS' team of consultants, who took care of the coding while ConEd handled the deployment.

"If we had done this the historical way, with custom-coding, it would have cost a couple million dollars and taken years," says Kressner, who declined to comment on the actual cost of implementation, other than to say it was fairly inexpensive.

By implementing visualization software, the company has opened a new eye of sorts that allows employees to watch the power grids, feeders, and transformers graphically on a three-dimensional map of Maanhattan from which they can drill down as far as to a particular pothole.

The new graphical interface makes it easier to tell if a wire is overloaded and might break down or if there are problems with feeders or transformers that might prevent power from reaching its destination. Operators can also monitor the overall use of power to ensure that a specific district doesn't use so much that it shortchanges other areas.

"Our data is much easier to digest now, and because of that we can more effectively monitor our power distribution," Kressner says. "Now we can spot problems that we couldn't even see in the past."

For example, several months ago ConEd had an overloaded section on its power distribution network which it fixed on the fly by adding a cable that was not equipped to handle the section on its own.

"Usually that serves as a quick fix and we go back and replace it with the appropriate cable later," Kressner says.

But if for some reason the technician who installed the cable didn't go back and swap in a new cable, power would continue flowing over the quick-fix cable, which might lead to problems later on, according to Kressner.

In the past that cable would have been buried in rows and columns and thus hard for network watchdogs to find. But now when ConEd runs a loadflow analysis on the power network with OpenViz, such a cable shows up in red and is easy to spot, Kressner says.

Not only does the maplike interface make it easier to see the data, but the data itself is actually more valuable now that OpenViz integrates all of ConEd's key data sources from dispersed sources and presents it in a single interface. Bearing in mind the age-old adage that if we don't understand the past we are doomed to repeat our mistakes in the future, Maffetone says that the company has been able to review past problems since implementing OpenViz.

"We've looked at historical data and been able to see which categories problems have occurred in," Maffetone says, adding that looking back with the graphical format made it easier to understand and digest the data than looking at rows and columns would have been.

Another benefit of OpenViz is that extending the graphical interface to other areas of ConEd will be a relatively simple matter now that the base infrastructure is in place, according to Maffetone. The original implementation is being used by network operators, but ConEd plans to build more hooks to different data sets so that engineers can reconfigure the network to create contingency models and instantly see the results of their changes.

Kressner says that the company also will adapt OpenViz for senior management's use in strategic planning. Another version available to the general public and government agencies will help them more fully comprehend power usage concerns.

"Ultimately, anyone with a Web browser and permission will be able to view this information in a specialized way," Kressner says.

The great question of the day is whether or not such visualization software could have helped California see its power problems coming and avert recent blackouts.

"The California issue is more about supply. This is about distribution. If you don't have the supply, distribution isn't the biggest problem," Kressner says.

But visualization software has helped ConEd gain an operational view of how the systems are functioning, and allows them to juggle supply, if need be, so as to avoid flow problems. This should give ConEd customers greater peace of mind.